Perhaps the most troubling characteristic is its ability to jump "airgaps," which are mechanisms that isolate infected computers from all the others on a network. It's just like amputating a limb to prevent the spread of infection. But badBIOS can jump these airgaps and continue to spread around a network.

In other words, as ArsTechnica describes, badBIOS has "self-healing capabilities."

A security consultant named Dragos Ruiu has been studying it closely and said that can ultimately infect Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux operating systems. While it's too early to say that there's an official fix for badBIOS, Ruiu has been able to stop badBIOS's ability to get around airgapped computer by removing that computer's internal speaker and microphone.